Bing's Update Wants to Turn Search into a Dialogue

Microsoft's steadily growing Web search challenger to Google is undergoing a spring renovation, with changes to the user interface and additions to vertical search options like Entertainment, Shopping, Travel, and Autos. A new Bing iPhone app has also been released.

Now that summer has officially started, Bing's new release is here. Microsoft's steadily growing Web search challenger to Google is undergoing a renovation, with changes to the user interface and additions to vertical search options like Entertainment, Shopping, Travel, and Autos. A new Bing iPhone app has also been released, with new commerce and social features, including product barcode reading.

"Our focus is trying to get to an intent-based dialogue model as opposed to hit or miss model we have today," Microsoft's director of Bing Search, Stefan Weitz, said in an interview. "We also went back to the research and figured out what kind of decisions people were trying to make with web search and we built a new experience around this. The number one request we get is 'help me complete a task more quickly.'"

The most obvious changes are on Bing's redesigned result page. Options have moved from the left rail to a tab bar, which Weitz calls the "answer bar," above the result area. The left rail will now just offer refinements to your search query; for example, a search for "birds" offered "Kinds of Birds," "Wild Birds," "Pictures Wild Birds," and "Bird Species". On the tab bar above were the options "Web," "Images," and "Wikipedia". A search for "Salma Hayek" yielded some different options on the tab bar  "Web," "Images," "News," "Videos," "Wikipedia," and "Blogs".

Speaking of entertainers, another new focus of Bing is vertical result pages, especially for entertainment. Wietz noted that a full 10 percent of web queries revolved around entertainment of one kind or another. The new Bing Entertainment verticals include richer content for Music, TV, Movies, and Games. New music result pages will offer song lyrics, the ability to play 6.8 million songs directly on the result page using a Zune player popup, and the ability to buy songs from either Amazon, iTunes, or Zune.

For TV, users will get quick access to listing, episodes, reviews, and images. They'll also be able to directly invite their Facebook or Twitter contacts to watch a show together. Movie fans will now get access to reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and Flixter.

Gamers get a lot of new features in the Spring Bing release: not only is there information on 60,000 popular games, but casual games can be played immediately: I did a search on "Bejeweled," and the top result showed an image of the game and featured a "Play now" button right at the bottom of the entry. How about that for instant gratification! The more hardcore gamers get quick access to reviews, cheat sheets, walkthroughs, videos, and purchase.

In a more serious vein, Bing Health results now offer clinical trial data , new sources including Harvard Health, the CDC, and TeensHealth. Health information sources can also now update their content with Twitter, and Bing will instantly update it in its search results.

Bing Maps now offers embedded third-party maps, smoother photosynths, reverse address lookup, interactive labels, more business details (like restaurant reviews), and filtering of business searches (like "only show me four star Chinese restaurants within 5 miles with prices under $40"). You'll even be able to walk inside some restaurants virtually. One new Bing map application will please many a suburbanite: Parking finder. Bing's map app SDK has been opened so that any developer can add his own twist on what can be done with rich mapping.

Shopping is a big part of Web search, and though Microsoft recently discontinued the Bing Cashback program, the company is still moving forward with Bing Shopping. Now users can share deals their social networks, perform faceted search by specifications, select from 28 categories with over 300 more-specific subcategories. Product pages have been redesigned to better show ratings, reviews, and product images, and merchant ratings have been introduced. Auto pages now feature detailed specs and reviews, along with data from MSN Autos.

Events pages have, too, been redesigned, letting users search for all of a specified performer's appearances or see all events at a particular venue.

The new Bing Social Search uses data from Microsoft's partnerships with Twitter and Facebook to show people what's hot at the moment.

The new Bing iPhone app gets more social, showing combined Facebook and Twitter updates from friends, just as Microsoft's recent Messenger iPhone app does. Not only does it now scan bar codes to bring up descriptions, and sometimes reviews, prices, and store links, but you can also simply hold an album or book cover for the same. The Movie section now plays trailers and makes finding showtimes simpler.

Bing continues to innovate, and its creators must be gratified to see its innovations being copied by its formidable, market-leading competitor, Google. Most recently, that search giant even mimicked Bing's photo backgrounds, but quickly retreated because of the resulting user confusion. A few weeks earlier, Google unveiled its permanent left-hand sidebar of search options, a hallmark of Bing since its inception. Just as Microsoft held sway in the browser world a few years ago, competition has forced all products to get better, and I'm happy to see this happening in web search, where one player has dominated for several years.

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine’s lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine’s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of Web Services (pretty much the progenitor of Web 2.0) for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine’s Solutions section, which in those days covered programming techniques as well as tips on using popular office software. Most recently he covered Web...
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